I haven’t seen either of them since last March, nine long months ago, over freshman year spring break. Maggie went on a family vacation to Disney World and everyone else on my hall had apparently planned some trip to the Keys that I only learned about the day before they departed. I would have happily chosen to stay in my room by myself, spending the week catching up on schoolwork or simply watching TV, but Hines was closed during break. All the dorms were. For one fleeting moment, I thought about staying behind anyway, getting locked inside after the RAs left. Roaming the abandoned building like some kind of purgatoried ghost. But I hadn’t moved quick enough when Janice came around, poking her head into every room to make sure they were empty.
When she saw me sitting on the futon, eyes wide and faking innocence, I heard her swear under her breath before walking into our room and hovering while I packed.
“Oh, sweetie,” my mother says to me now as I step out of the driver’s seat, pulling me in for a hug. She smells the same: a permanent scent of sunscreen seeped into her arms mixed with the perfume my father gifts her each year for Christmas. She’s always dropping hints that she wants something different, but every single year, she unwraps it and acts surprised. “Thank God you’re here.”
“Hey, Mom.”
“How were finals?”
“Fine,” I say, detaching myself. “I feel good about them.”
“You’re still wanting to major in English, then?”
I stay quiet, already knowing what she’ll say next.
“I’m really not sure about that, Margot. It’s not practical, and the longer you wait, the harder it’ll be to change it—”
“I like English,” I say. “I’m not changing it.”
“But what are you going to do with that, though?”
“Honey,” my dad interrupts. “Let’s let her get unpacked first.”
“Right, right,” my mother says, holding up her hands. “And your friends?” she asks. “They’re good?”
“They’re good.”
I force myself to smile, walking around to the trunk and hoisting a duffel bag out of the back.
“Well, I would hope so, considering they’ve completely stolen you from us.”
“They haven’t stolen me,” I say, pulling the bag over my arm. “I’ve just been busy.”
“You’ll tell us all about them,” she continues, a command more than a question, before turning around and making her way back toward the house. My father nods at me, his version of a hug, before twisting around and trailing her silently. “Everything there is to know.”
Dinner goes by in the way it always does: the clinking of silverware against my mother’s best china, the three of us rattling off the kind of sterile small talk you’d expect to overhear at a networking event. It’s so vastly different than the family dinners I used to have at Eliza’s, I can’t help but compare them: the ever-present music filling their house compared to the long, heavy stretches of silence in ours. Their belly laughs and genuine conversation next to our stale, recycled lines. I know there’s nothing inherently wrong with my parents. They’ve always loved me, provided for me, given me whatever I’ve needed and more—it’s just that they don’t really seem to like each other that much. Their marriage feels like a transaction, purely business, and I am the output of twenty years’ worth of work. Maybe that’s why my mother hounds me so much about my life, my choices. Why my father always seems to be silently assessing me like I’m a line item in one of his spreadsheets.
I am an investment to them, their only child. If I fail, they fail, and everybody knows it.
My mother leaves my dad to the dishes once we’re finished and the two of us walk to my bedroom together, like she’s positive I must have forgotten the way. I open the door to find they’ve left it virtually untouched, the entire space like a time capsule preserving the person I used to be.
“You know, you can donate this stuff,” I say as I flip on the lights, scanning it all. The stuffed animals I used to sleep with are still propped on my bed like they’ve been waiting for me this entire time, disappointment stamped across their fuzzy faces at how long I’ve stayed away. The clothes I didn’t take to college are still hanging in my closet, by now outdated and most likely too small, and there’s even a picture of Eliza and me tacked to the wall: that one in our graduation caps, stiff smiles in the auditorium, the edges curling in on themselves like a ribbon of shaved wood. “I don’t need it anymore.”